Even though Log4J is one of the most widely used logging framework, it's not the best. You've got Logback for example, which was created by the founder of Log4J, and has several performance enhancements. You also have a lot of other logging frameworks, and it's totally wrong to force your consumer to use one of your choice.

If you spend hours hacking your site to work perfectly in IE6, you're taking away any incentive from slow adopters to drop their old browser. Drop IE6 support on your site or app and give people a reason to upgrade.

After being into the software development career for more than a year now, I feel I understand what is expected from a "Software Developer". There are a lot of things that need to be done, and they need to be done with care. I see everyday that a lot of developers around me take software development as a job-to-be-done and not as a passion. Anyways, I'm here to talk about what I, as a software developer do to write better code everyday

I am a programmer, therefore my brain is my most important tool to invest in.

Me thinks Google Chrome is the most significant and worthy app that Google has produced since Gmail. It's remarkable on its own merits. What do you think?

A look at some of the under-rated texts of Computer Science. We all know about TAOCP and SICP, but sometimes we forget about some of the lesser knowns.

java Generics was born in sin, but it also breaks java exception model.

Should you code for performance or readability?

Coupling is the AIDS of software development. It won’t directly kill your project but it will make it easy for something else to kill it off. As coupling rises the ability of the developers to simply understand the code, make orthogonal changes, and test the thing is reduced. You can measure these symptoms as the length of time it takes to make a change, add a new feature, or fix a defect. Eventually these problems get so bad that the “One Rewrite To Rule Them All” is ordered from CEO-ron from up on corporate Mount Doom or the whole thing is simply cancelled. Both of those are generally thought of as Bad Things.

Am I just failing to see something or is concurrency something the Java community will deal with in 2010?

For those living under a rock, GridGain is a Java implementation of a Google-ish map / reduce system. The effect is that, with very little code and even less configuration, one can cause suitable code to run in parallel, on a grid of JVM nodes.

Work on projects that you love, that solve your problems, that yield products that you would use. You have the rest of your life to build software for other people, so why not build something for yourself? (Along the way, you might find that others have the same use cases, have the same problems, and love the same products as you—yes, you may not be a unique little snowflake after all).

A few idiosyncrasies I've encountered with Python. The problems with Lambda's, Scoping, and Number handling.

Most people who are reading this blog are probably either full-time software developers, computer science students, or people who are working or studying in related fields. In other words, nearly all of your time 9-5 is spent working on programming or something similar, for someone else, to get paid money, to pay the rent/mortgage and send the kids to college some day. I think a lot of software developers got into the industry because they really love to write software, despite all of the challenges, headaches, long sleepless nights and seemingly-intractable problems. Because, really, there are few feelings in the world that compare to cracking a really tough problem that you’ve been banging your head against for ages.

Before we see what Google is hoping to achieve with Chrome, let's take a look at a precedent from history that I find quite spooky. Old-timers may excuse this brief wallow in nostalgia.

I have a strong interest in visual programming. Many programmers say it is not practical but they are ignoring its big success in CG. Almost every highend CG software has a node tree and it is a visual programming environment in a sense.

Every now and then I see someone, usually from Sun, say that “if you are interested in feature x please go to the Bug Parade and vote for it. It is how we know what to work on”. The problem is that this does not seem to be the case, and I have a very good example.

Reflections on spending one day doing TDD. Then other thoughts about how testing has changed my developer habits.

The preparations for the Top 100 Software Development Blogs are going along nicely. Which is to say... my eyes are still not watery enough to feed my plants. And I keep RSI at bay by browsing and doing yoga at the same time.

Again, I’ve found someone. I considered stopping last time. But this one is too good. I will only pick some parts of the post, there is not enough time to fight all stupidity there is in the world - I need to choose my battles. As the last two posts, I’ve again chosen someone who rants and has an aggressive and insulting tone without any knowledge of the matter the writes about.

In this post I proudly present the Top 100 of Best Software Engineering Books, Ever. I have created this list using four different criteria: 1) number of Amazon reviews, 2) average Amazon rating, 3) number of Google hits and 4) Jolt awards. Please refer to the bottom of this post to find out how I performed the calculations, how to receive the full top 100 list in PDF MS Word, and why that obscure and silly little publication of yours has not made it on my list.

When we were just 3 people trying to get Wufoo launched on a limited budget and timeframe, we felt that it was necessary for us to work 7 days a week and expect 80+ hours out of each member on the team. Obviously, a grueling schedule like that can’t last forever and now that we’re a 6 man operation that’s expanded outside of the passion of the founders, it’s been necessary for us to find a balance between productivity and happiness. The following is what we’ve learned after spending some time experimenting with your typical 5 day workweeks and the much hyped 4 day workweeks.

Today I discovered a very powerful addition to the PHP world. Phar is an archive extension for PHP that allows an entire PHP application to be packaged into a single file. It’s basically PHP’s answer to Java’s .jar archive format. Don’t get excited yet, it gets better . . .

I was just having a conversation with a friend, a Rubyist whose opinion I respect, who clued me in that he really hates when JRuby users use Java libraries with little or no Ruby syntactic sugar. He hates that there's a better chance every day that Java-related technologies will enter his world. That he's going to have to fix someone's Java-like Ruby. He lamented the lack of decent wrapper libraries that hide "the Java insanity", that are just bare-metal shims over the Java classes they call. He expressed his frustration that JRuby being successful will mean he's going to have to deal with Java. He doesn't want to *ever* have to do that.

We’ve done some extensive work on cloud computing (i.e., deploying Java grid applications on cloud environment) here at GridGain and there is a distinct set of problems and challenges associated with that work whether it is related to the cloud computing in general or to grid middleware you are using on it.